The Electronic Classroom of
Tomorrow, an online charter school based here, graduated 2,371
students last spring. At the commencement ceremony, a student speaker
triumphantly told her classmates that the group was “the single-largest
graduating high school class in the nation.”
What she did not say was this: Despite
the huge number of graduates — this year, the school is on track to graduate
2,300 — more students drop out of the Electronic Classroom or fail to finish
high school within four years than at any other school in the country,
according to federal data. For every 100 students who graduate on time, 80 do
not.
Even as the national on-time graduation
rate has hit a record high of 82 percent, publicly funded online schools
like the Electronic Classroom have become the new dropout factories.
These schools take on students with
unorthodox needs — like serious medical problems or experiences with bullying —
that traditional districts may find difficult to meet. But with no physical
classrooms and high pupil-to-teacher ratios, they cannot provide support in
person.
“If you’re disconnected or struggling
or you haven’t done well in school before, it’s going to be tough to succeed in
this environment,” said Robert Balfanz, the director of the Everyone
Graduates Center, a nonprofit research and advocacy group in
Baltimore.
Virtual schools have experienced
explosive growth nationwide in recent years, financed mostly by state money.
But according to a report released on Tuesday by America’s
Promise Alliance, a consortium of education advocacy groups, the average
graduation rate at online schools is 40 percent.
Few states have as many students in
e-schools as Ohio. Online charter schools here are educating one out of every
26 high school students, yet their graduation rates are worse than those in the
state’s most impoverished cities, including Cleveland and Youngstown.
With 17,000 pupils, most in high
school, the Electronic Classroom is the largest online school in the state.
Students and teachers work from home on computers, communicating by email or on
the school’s web platform at distances that can be hundreds of miles apart.
In 2014, the school’s graduation
rate did not even reach 39 percent. Because of this poor record, as well as
concerns about student performance on standardized tests, the school is now
under “corrective action” by a state regulator, which is determining its next
steps.
But while some students may not have
found success at the school, the Electronic Classroom has richly rewarded
private companies affiliated with its founder, William Lager, a software
executive.
When students enroll in the Electronic
Classroom or in other online charters, a proportion of the state money allotted
for each pupil is redirected from traditional school districts to the
cyberschools. At the Electronic Classroom, which Mr. Lager founded in 2000, the
money has been used to help enrich for-profit companies that he leads. Those
companies provide school services, including instructional materials and public
relations.
For example, in the 2014 fiscal year,
the last year for which federal tax filings were available, the school
paid the companies associated with Mr. Lager nearly $23 million, or about
one-fifth of the nearly $115 million in government funds it took in.
Critics say the companies associated
with Mr. Lager have not delivered much value. “I don’t begrudge people making
money if they really can build a better mousetrap,” said Stephen Dyer, a former
Ohio state legislator and the education policy fellow at Innovation Ohio, a
Columbus think tank that is sharply critical of online charter schools.
“It’s clear that Mr. Lager has not done
a service over all to kids, and certainly not appreciably better than even the
most struggling school districts in the state,” Mr. Dyer added. “But he’s
becoming incredibly wealthy doing a very mediocre job for kids."
Mr. Lager declined requests for an
interview. In an emailed statement on Tuesday, he did not respond to questions
about his affiliated companies but said the Electronic Classroom’s graduation
rate did not accurately measure the school’s performance.
In the statement, he said many students
arrived at the school already off-track and have trouble making up the course
credits in time to graduate.
“Holding a school accountable for such
students is like charging a relief pitcher with a loss when they enter a game
three runs behind and wiping out the record of the starting pitcher,” his
statement said.
The statement added that the school
“should be judged based on an accountability system that successfully controls
for the academic effects of demographic factors such as poverty, special needs
and mobiliy
In an interview, Rick
Teeters, the superintendent of the Electronic Classroom, said many of the
students were older than was typical for their grade, while others faced
serious life challenges, including pregnancy or poverty.
Mr. Lager is correct
in noting that the student body at the Electronic Classroom is highly mobile;
last year more than half the school’s students enrolled for less than the full
school year. And of those who dropped out of high school, half were forced to
withdraw after being reported truant.
Also, according to
state data, 19 percent of the students have disabilities, higher than the state
average.
But the proportion of
students who come from low-income families — just under 72 percent — is lower
than in Cleveland, Columbus and Dayton. Close to three-quarters of the school’s
students are white.
In a self-published
book in 2002, “The Kids That ECOT Taught,” Mr. Lager wrote that “the dropout
rate is the most critical issue facing our public education system but it is
only the first of many problems that can be solved by e-learning.”
Through the
Electronic Classroom, he wrote, he planned to make public education more
efficient and effective.
He added, “No
business could suffer results that any school in Columbus Public delivers and
not be driven out of business.”
Peggy Lehner, a
Republican state senator who sponsored a charter school reform bill that passed
the legislature last fall, said the problem was the school, not the students.
“When you take on a
difficult student, you’re basically saying, ‘We feel that our model can help
this child be successful,’ ” she said. “And if you can’t help them be
successful, at some point you have to say your model isn’t working, and if your
model is not working, perhaps public dollars shouldn’t be going to pay for it.”
Some of those public
dollars are being paid to IQ Innovations and Altair Learning Management,
companies associated with Mr. Lager. Altair has had a contract with the school
since 2000, a school spokesman, Neil Clark, said. According to federal filings,
it received $4.2 million in 2014. Mr. Lager is the company’s chief executive.
Mr. Clark said Altair
provided “a variety of services,” including a program of instruction, strategic
planning, public relations, financial reporting and budgeting.
In filings with the
Ohio secretary of state, Mr. Lager is listed as a registered agent for IQ
Innovations; in campaign finance records, he was listed as the company’s
chief executive as recently as 2015. IQ Innovations received $18.7 million from
the school in 2014.
Mr. Clark said IQ
Innovations had provided the school with grading software and digital
curriculum materials since 2008.
He said that neither
Altair nor IQ Innovations was required to go through a competitive bidding
process.
At the school’s
headquarters, in a former mall set at the back of a parking lot here,
attendance clerks sit in a windowless room, tracking how often students log in
to the network. Those who do not log in for 30 days are reported as truant.
Guidance counselors carry
caseloads of up to 500 students each, and the schoolwide pupil-teacher ratio is
30 to one.
For some students,
the Electronic Classroom can provide a release valve from the pressures or
frustrations of a traditional school. Several students assembled by the school
to talk to a reporter said they had experienced bullying or boredom before
enrolling.
“Without the
bullying, I was able to focus,” said Sydney DeBerry, 20, who left a private
school to enroll in the Electronic Classroom, which she graduated from in 2014.
“That was a big distraction, not only to my work but to my individuality.”
Students who made it
to graduation said self-motivation was crucial. “Contrary to popular opinion,
you cannot just log on once a week and get by and still pass your classes,”
said Dianna Norwood, 19, who graduated last year and is now a student at Ohio
State University.
But other students
complained that the school could make it difficult to succeed.
Alliyah Graham, 19,
said she had sought out the Electronic Classroom during her junior year because
she felt isolated as one of a few African-American girls at a mostly white
public school in a Cincinnati suburb.
It took three weeks
for the Electronic Classroom to enter her in its system, she said. Then it
assigned her to classes she had already passed at her previous school. When she
ran into technical problems, she said, “I really just had to wing it.”
Ms. Graham, who hopes
to pursue a career in medicine, has also been disappointed by the quality of
assignments. She showed a reporter a digital work sheet for a senior English
class, in which students were asked to read a passage and then fill in boxes,
circles and trapezoids, noting the “main idea,” a “picture/drawing,” or
“questions you have.”
“I feel like I did
this kind of work in middle school,” Ms. Graham said.
When she turns in
assignments, she said, feedback from teachers is minimal. “Good job!” they
write. “Keep going!”
She hopes to graduate
this spring.
Her cousin, Makyla
Woods, 19, moved to Cincinnati from Georgia last year, as a senior, to live
with her father. Since Ms. Graham was already enrolled in the Electronic
Classroom, Ms. Woods decided to give it a try.
But she soon moved
out from her father’s apartment, took a job at McDonald’s and stopped doing
assignments. “I just got lazy doing work on the computer,” she said.
Writer: Motoko rich
Source: The New York Times
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